The leaves are starting to change, and soon the legislative sessions will too. Are you ready? This post will explain what to expect inside your BillTrack50 account when the new year begins. We offer some suggestions for things you might want to do ahead of time to prepare, like save a snapshot of your bill sheets, and offer some resources to help you knock the rust off if it has been a while since you logged on.
If you have specific questions or would like to go through this list together (and maybe dust off your BillTrack50 skills) join one of our getting ready webinars (multiple sessions from Nov 6 through Dec 15 with more to be added), contact us, or simply grab a time on Karen or Sarah’s calendar for some personal help. If you just need a small refresher on how BillTrack50 works you can review our getting started post or check out one of our videos.
And now, without further ado, our checklist:
Review Users
We know people come and go, so we’ve worked hard to make it easy to manage users in your account. This time of year is a great time to make sure everyone on your user list is still appropriate, review permissions, and make sure you haven’t forgotten to add someone. Remember all subscriptions come with unlimited users so you can be as generous as you need to be.
Access the Manage Users screen from the red account menu button in the top corner of the screen:
Note: only the Company Administrator will have the Manage Users option in their account menu. If you don’t have that option but need it, either contact your Company Administrator or contact us.
On the Manage Users screen, you will see a list of all of your users, as well as which users have logged in and when. You can add users with the add user button at the top, or deactivate accounts by clicking the edit link next to a user’s name and unchecking the “active” checkbox in the top section. You can also review and update permission levels as appropriate for each user.
If you invited someone and they haven’t been able to get in yet, you can send them the invitation email again. Simply click on the edit link next to their name, and then you’ll see a “send invitation email” button on the next screen. That button only shows up for people who haven’t clicked the invitation link yet. If you are having trouble with the invitation for any reason, you can also have the user simply register for BillTrack50 using our standard registration form (using the same email you used when you set them up) and they will automatically be hooked up to your account the first time they log in.
You might also pop into the Edit Profile section to review yourself; update your own email address if it has changed or change your password.
Save Snapshots of Ongoing Bill Sheets
Archiving a sheet means bills will no longer be added or removed from the sheet automatically; BillTrack50 will still continue to update the status information. Archiving a sheet also removes it from your Change Alerts dashboard, and drops it to the bottom of your list of bill sheets on the Bill Sheets tab, getting it out of the way. In general, you might want to use archiving for a sheet that you created for a special project, or for a bill sheet you used to create a widget, map, or stakeholder page for a blog post, or for any other list of bills you would like to remain static and also out of the way.
More relevant to this checklist, however, is using archiving to take a “snapshot” of a bill sheet. If you are maintaining a list of key bills, have spent a lot of time curating a bill sheet based on keywords, or have entered a lot of additional information into your bill sheet using custom columns, you may want to save a copy of your bill sheet for future review. Archiving sheets at the end of the year is also a good way to build up a library of issues you’ve tracked over the years to mine for trends, share with others, or use to create a “lifetime” scorecard to look at legislators across the years.
To take a snapshot we recommend making a copy of your current sheet and then archiving the copy. Keeping the original sheet active means you won’t need to change your widgets or stakeholder pages, and your users won’t need to change their alert settings. Everything will keep rolling along into the new year just as it was this year. Here are the steps to do make your snapshot using that approach:
1. Open the bill sheet you want to archive. Go to the manage tab. Make a copy of your sheet using the copy button at the bottom of the page.
2. Give the copy a new name, probably you want to include the year as part of the name. The next screen will give you some options about what to copy.
Since you are intending this bill sheet to be an archive, you definitely want to save your Custom Column Data so keep that box checked, and you probably don’t want to bother with Alert Settings so uncheck that box. If you would like users who can see the current sheet to also see the archived sheet, leave User Permissions checked. If you think the extra sheets might be confusing to your users, uncheck this box. You can always go to the manage tab of the copy and share it with specific users later after you have finished these steps.
Finish the process and finalize the copy, which will create the new bill sheet and open it for you. Even more detailed information on copying is available here.
3. Confirm you have the new copy you just created open by checking the name of your sheet, then go to the manage tab and scroll to the bottom. Toggle the archive slider on and agree to the confirmation message. (Note: you’ll need to contact us if you ever change your mind and want to unarchive a sheet). IMPORTANT you now need to click the save button for the archive change to take effect, saying ok to the warning isn’t enough.
4. You can double check everything worked by going to your bill sheet tab and making sure the copy is at the bottom of the list and has a checkmark in the archive column. You might need to refresh your screen to see the changes if you’ve gone back to an old screen.
Confirm Widget and Stakeholder Page Connections on Your Website Are Still Current
It is a good idea to periodically check that your widgets, maps, and stakeholder pages are still hooked up and working. If you accidentally delete the bill sheet that your sharing tools are attached to, they will stop working. If you archived sheets as described above, it is also a good idea to double check in January that your widgets, maps, and stakeholder are showing new data. If you followed the steps and archived the copy of the bill sheet, everything will be fine. If you have archived the bill sheet the widget, map, or stakeholder page was based on, you won’t see new bills coming through.
If something has gone wrong you may want to simply grab the code from the widget tab or stakeholder page again, and paste it back into your web page. If that isn’t possible, or if that doesn’t fix the issue, don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll help you get sorted out.
If you’d like some inspiration for new widgets, maps, or scorecards, see this post, which we update from time to time with new examples.
Understand How Your Bill Sheets Will Roll Forward
As soon as we have bills from the 2019 session in your state(s) you will see “2019” as an option on the year number line — national bill sheets will already have 2019 available, single state or regional sheets will see 2019 as a choice as bills become available for the new year. We will automatically add 2019 to the query for any bill sheet that includes 2018, unless the bill sheet has been archived. So all of your bill sheets will start capturing new bills automatically. For a list of dates when we first got bills for each session in past years, see the bottom of this post, which I’ve been referring to a lot lately.
If you don’t want your bill sheet to capture new legislation you can simply go in and remove 2019 from your year number line any time you like. Note, NJ has a 2018-2019 session; choosing 2019 only will still show all bills from the whole session. Bill sheets include any session that overlaps any part of the date number line.
Remove Out of Session Bills from Bill Sheets and Update Date Ranges on Regulation Sheets
If you are using your bill sheet to drive a widget or a map on your website, you might also want to remove Out Of Session Bills. Otherwise, your readers might get confused about why they are looking at bills from sessions that are over. Of course, if you are listing historic bills for a specific reason, by all means, leave them in there.
For bill sheets based on keywords, simply update your year number line to not include 2018. (Remember NJ bills from 2018 are part of the 2018-2019 session so they will remain on your sheet). However, if you have a bill sheet that is mostly or entirely bills you’ve added by bill number by typing in bill numbers, using the plus/list button, or using the Track This Bill button; the bill numbers will need to be cleaned up. When you add a bill by bill number we assume you really do want that bill and include it on your bill sheet no matter what the other query items say — which is important now because that means these bills won’t be dropped even if you change the year number line.
Removing old bill numbers is easy. Open your bill sheet, go to the query tab, and scroll to the bottom to see the bills you have listed by bill number. You can 1) use the little x next to the bill number to remove individual bills, 2) click in the bill number box after the last bill number and then hold down the backspace key to quickly obliterate all of the bill numbers, or 3) use the Remove tool beneath the box.
Bills from 2018 sessions will not be considered out of session until Jan 1, 2019. After that date, use the Remove tool by first hovering over the Remove link to highlight in red which bills are about to be eliminated, just to make sure you are happy with what is going to happen. Then actually click on the remove link to remove them. Note: you will still have to click the save button at the bottom of the query tab for the changes to go into effect. This Remove tool is helpful to remove all the bills at once if you have many of them. It is especially nice because it will leave behind NJ bills that are still relevant. It will also show you if you’ve accidentally left some bills on your sheet in years past.
If you’ve worked hard to compile your list of bills, please do be sure to make a copy of the bill sheet before deleting all the bill numbers. See the snapshot section above if you haven’t yet. You can always delete the snapshot later, and better safe than sorry!
You might also want to review the dates on your regulation sheets. Because regulations don’t come in nice tidy sessions, regulation sheets include a date range option to give you a way to limit the time span you are searching. If you read your regulations regularly and remove ones you don’t need, that’s great, the date range won’t matter to you. Otherwise, you might want to review your regulation sheet queries and change the date range you are searching to make sure the time period makes sense for what you are trying to do.
Review Your Bill Sheet Queries and Alert Settings
While you are stepping through your bill sheets deciding if there are any you should save, archive, update to 2019, or simply delete, you should also take this opportunity to glance at your queries and make sure they still look good to you. You might notice a few words you’d like to remove, or have become aware of some words to add. Or maybe you were getting too many bills (or not enough); this is a good time to tweak your search so you are in good shape for next year. If you’d like a consultation, feel free to grab a time on our calendar whenever you need. If you are happy with your 2018 bills you might also take this chance to turn on the keyword column to browse through and make sure you are familiar with all the terms currently being used in case there are a few words you should add or remove for 2019.
You should also look at your alert settings for each one of your bill sheets to make sure you didn’t miss turning them on, or that the settings aren’t what you thought they were. You can also think about the emails you were getting and decide to increase or decrease the number of alerts you have chosen. And don’t overlook the event schedule.
Review New Features
Before the year starts is also a great time to become familiar with the new features that were released over the summer.
First, a quick recap of new features from 2017. Presumably, you’ve been using the year number line and new list button for managing bills and are comfortable with those features now. But did you realize we added some new columns about a year ago for you to use on your bill sheets? We added new features to templates, including a default sort. We added quite a bit to scorecards too, including sponsor points. Finally, we added in features like the list button, custom columns, and adding individual regulations to make regulation sheets more like bill sheets.
For 2018, the most fundamental change was to our search engine; you’ve probably already noticed you’ve been getting your alerts earlier in the morning. But we also made some great changes to our app (making it more useful for organizations and stakeholders), seen a new scorecard product released, and created a youtube help list for you to get help whenever is convenient for you. See this post for a complete rundown of the various improvements and new features.